Joe Biden has confirmed he will seek a second term in the White House, firing the starting gun on a 2024 election that is likely to be a rerun of his 2020 contest against Donald Trump.
Biden’s predecessor as president “remains the clear frontrunner” for the Republican nomination, the BBC said, meaning that the US is heading for the “sequel few Americans want to see”.
The question is, will the outcome this time be any different?
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What did the papers say?
Biden launched his 2024 re-election bid on Tuesday morning with a video entitled “Let’s Finish the Job”. The announcement came precisely four years after he began his last campaign, catapulting him to the presidency.
The video begins with a montage of footage from the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021 and “reaffirms his commitment to fighting for freedom and democracy”, The Independent said. Biden warns that “Maga extremists” are determined to cut social security “while offering tax breaks to the wealthy and assaulting abortion rights, LGBT+ values, limiting voting access and banning books”, said the news site.
However, Biden’s real battle, according to CNN, is not against Republican policy, but rather whether his “record merits another four years in the White House” and whether “his age won’t impede his ability to govern”.
Age has been the preoccupation of a lot of commentary before and after Biden announced his bid. If he wins, he will be 82 when he re-enters office and 86 when his term ends, making him the oldest person to assume the presidency, beating his own record.
An NBC News poll released over the weekend found that 70% of Americans, including 51% of Democrats, believe Biden should not run for a second term and that 48% of respondents cited his age as the main reason for their concerns.
Yet according to a February report from the White House physician, Dr Kevin C. O’Connor, Biden is “a healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male”.
It is true that the president “has no major medical problems, doesn’t smoke or drink and exercises at least five days a week”, said The New York Times. But the effects of ageing can be unpredictable, according to Holly Holmes, a gerontology professor at the University of Texas.
“The spectrum of health at older ages varies so widely,” Dr Holmes told the paper. “As we get older, we are more and more unlike our peers, and it becomes harder to generalise what a ‘typical’ 80-year-old would be like.”
Of course, if Biden’s challenger does turn out to be Donald Trump, he is not much younger. Trump will be 78 during the 2024 election campaign, so he too would be an octogenarian by the end of his term.
What next?
In a video response to Biden’s re-election bid, Republicans released an artificial intelligence-generated attack ad that “simulates a second Biden term plagued by disasters”, said Quartz.
The video shows Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris “navigating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, martial law in San Francisco, and a collection of other domestic and international crises”, all against a backdrop of AI-produced imagery.
Biden’s announcement, which frames the 2024 election as a “battle for the soul of the nation”, and the Republican response demonstrate why many feel next year’s poll “will be even more nerve-wracking than the last”, said the i news site.
Recent polling has put the two candidates almost neck and neck, said The Telegraph. In one of two polls taken by Redfield and Wilton Strategies last month, Trump led Biden by one point – 40% to 39%. In the second poll the pair were tied at 44%.
As the incumbent, Biden goes into the election with “an immediate advantage”, the paper said, given that “aside from Mr Trump, every sitting US president in the last 30 years has won a second term”.
Many commentators believe the Democrats are simply hoping that Trump’s unpalatability to independent voters will see Biden over the line.
Bruce Mehlman, a former official under President George W. Bush, told The Hill that Biden’s team “think Trump will lose moderates on issues, like claims of election fraud in the 2020 election and abortion”.
Mehlman predicts that “Trump will cede the centre by relitigating 2020 and Republicans will lose independents over abortion fundamentalism”. As a result “Team Biden believes they beat Trump before so they can beat him again”.
